September 10, 2004

The Seven Palm Applications of Highly Effective People (2)

Life Balance for Palm was developed by a computer professional who grew tired of having the borders between her life and work become blurry. So she coded a time management application. Right? Not exactly. Well, Life Balance can be seen as a time and task management program. It does handle tasks and appointments. However, unlike most such applications, it has left the paradigm of the scheduled date book altogether. In Life Balance, there is no ledger book – instead, it boldly moved towards a non-linear model, and proposes using a complex tree of tasks starting from life goals and ending in minute tasks. The too-complex-to-comprehend tree is dynamically sorted, and the important tasks for a certain time and place bubble up to the surface. “Life Balance helps you focus on what is important to you and actively balance the often-conflicting demands of career and personal life”, the creators of the software program say. We are dealing here with a new breed of application, and I agree to its creators definition: it is coaching software.

Life Balance emphasizes the intrinsic importance that you have assigned to your projects and life goals, rather than arbitrarily filling slots in your calendar. It also shows you only tasks that are relevant to your current place and time. It all helps you to spend your time and energy on what matters to you the most.

Life Balance teaches you to set priorities and increase personal productivity in a new way. Items on a to-do list can have a high priority for different reasons: because they are part of an important project, because the deadline is near-at-hand, because you are in the right place to take action, or because you have been neglecting the task.

Internally, Life Balance uses fuzzy logic math techniques to balance all these competing factors. As a result, it can provide you with an easy to use, sorted list that makes it simple to figure out what is the most important thing that you can do right here, right now.

“Ultimately”, write Life Balance creators, “Life Balance is software designed to help you acheive that feeling that you are living authentically and following your own unique path”.

Life Balance has been released in 1995, and has a desktop application counterpart to its Palm application. I have used it for a long time, and the mere experience of moving to working with it was a very enlightening experience. I now use other applications to manage my agenda, but that is partly because as a training program, Life Balance did its job for me, teaching me about the areas – and times of day - in which I should get clearer. In other words, it managed to install habits in me. Few software applications can do that.